AMD Ryzen 7 1700X CPU Review

The market for people buying an expensive CPU and using it for gaming at 1080p is likely to be very slim. What 1080p does is give a good indication of the CPU’s raw gaming performance as GPU power is sufficient to push frame rates to a level where the CPU and memory limitations can be observed.

We supplement the 1080p gaming results with a trio of games tested at 4K. That multiple-hundred pound saving against Intel’s competing 8C16T CPU could buy a nice 4K monitor, so we will show how Ryzen 7 performs at such a resolution.

Gears of War 4

We run the built-in benchmark using a 4K resolution and the same settings as the 1080p test (Ultra quality preset, Async Compute enabled).

Note: The Core i7-2700K and i7-4790K are not shown in Gears of War 4 as the game download was too large to install on their system SSD and the clunky Windows Store platform gives errors when moving games installed on a secondary SSD between test systems.

Grand Theft Auto V

We run the built-in benchmark using a 4K resolution and the same settings as the 1080p test (generally Maximum quality settings including Advanced Graphics).

The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt

We run our custom 107-second benchmark in a densely-populated town area using a 4K resolution and the same settings as the 1080p test (Maximum quality, Nvidia settings disabled).

4K Gaming Performance Overview:

Throw Ryzen 7 1700X into a GPU-limited situation where performance above 60 FPS is superficial and it handles itself well. You are unlikely to notice a difference between the 1700X and higher-priced (and lower, for that matter) Intel CPUs except for that fact that Ryzen 7 has significant spare processing power to conduct background operations, such as game streaming.

If you are a content creator who needs processing power for day-to-day tasks but you also want to fire up a 4K game in the evenings, Ryzen 7’s 1700X is a competent choice in such a scenario.